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Port authority to apply for more brownfield grants
By Ed Runyan
YOUNGSTOWN
The Western Reserve Port Authority has authorized its senior economic-development manager to apply for two more grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to identify and clean up brownfield sites.
The manager, Sarah Lown, worked for a decade on brownfield remediation in Mahoning County before going to work for the port authority and succeeded in getting a $600,000 EPA grant in 2013 to identify brownfield sites in Trumbull County.
Now she is hoping to secure grants of up to $600,000 to carry out the cleanup of one or two sites in either county and to continue to identify and evaluate brownfield sites in Trumbull.
The remediation money, if secured, would more likely be used in Mahoning County, Lown said, because there is an identified end-user for a specific brownfield site there.
It is one of the few brownfield sites still left in Mahoning County — because of the work she did earlier and because the county lost many of its big industrial complexes earlier than Trumbull County did.
Trumbull today has a large number of sites that need to be cleaned up before they can be re-used, but there are few that are ready for the cleanup phase, Lown said.
“Trumbull County has had so many layoffs” in recent years, Lown said of job losses at Delphi Packard Electric, RG Steel, General Electric and other facilities.
Wednesday’s port authority meeting also included a discussion of increasing marketing of the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport — to help promote the proposed startup of daily flights to Chicago and to keep customers who use the Allegiant flights to leisure destinations.
The meeting took place at the port authority’s new offices on Champion Street near Youngstown State University.
John Moliterno, the recently hired interim port authority executive director, and Aviation Director Dan Dickten noted that Pittsburgh International Airport and Cleveland Hopkins both will offer additional flights to leisure destinations in early 2015.
To keep Allegiant customers flying out of Vienna, the local airport will begin to promote its ease of use, Moliterno said. More details will be provided in mid-December, he said.
Dickten said he expects to hear soon whether the U.S. Department of Transportation has approved the application of Aerodynamics Inc. of Beachwood, Ohio, and Atlanta to start flights between Vienna and Chicago. The flights will begin 60 to 90 days after DOT approval, Dickten said.
The service would use 50-seat ADI aircraft flown by ADI pilots, but the ticketing would be handled by Silver Airways. Silver has agreements that would allow passengers to connect efficiently with flights in Chicago on American, United and Delta airlines, Dickten said.